Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Launches New Test Flight: NPR

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight Thursday, sending a prototype satellite into orbit thousands of miles above Earth.

Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket lifted off from Florida, rising from the same platform used to launch NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago.

In the works for years and with significant funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket carried an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their appropriate orbits.

For this test, the satellite had to stay inside the second stage while circling the Earth. The mission was expected to last six hours, with the second stage then placed in safe conditions to remain in high, out-of-the-way orbit, consistent with NASA practices to minimize space waste.

The first stage booster was intended to land on a barge in the Atlantic a few minutes after liftoff so it could be recycled.

New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn Monday, but ice buildup in critical plumbing caused a delay. The rocket is designed to carry spacecraft and possibly astronauts into orbit and also to the moon.

Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including itself. The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets, named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn, which pays homage to John Glenn, is five times larger.

Blue Origin has invested more than $1 billion in the New Glenn Launch Site, rebuilding the historic Cape Canaveral Space Station Complex 36. The platform is 14 kilometers from the company’s control centers and rocket factory, outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Bezos – participating in the launch from Mission Control – declined to disclose his personal investment in the program. He said he doesn’t see Blue Origin competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, long a dominator in rocket launches.

Blue Origin is planning six to eight New Glenn flights this year, if all goes well, with the next one planned for this spring.

“There’s room for a lot of winners,” Bezos said from the rocket factory over the weekend, adding that it was “the very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going working together as an industry.” .. to reduce the cost of access to space.”

New Glenn is the latest in a series of large, new rockets launched in recent years, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s upgraded Ariane 6, and NASA’s Space Launch System or SLS, the successor to NASA’s Saturn V. the space agency to send astronauts to the moon.

The largest rocket of all, measuring around 400 feet (123 meters), is SpaceX’s Starship. Elon Musk said the seventh test flight of the full rocket could take place later Thursday from Texas. He hopes to repeat what he achieved in October, catching the booster back on the launch pad with giant mechanical arms.

Starship is what NASA plans to use to land astronauts on the Moon later this decade. The first two moon landings under the space agency’s Artemis program, which follows the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, will see crews descend from lunar orbit to the surface aboard spacecraft.

Blue Origin’s lander, named Blue Moon, will debut during the astronauts’ third lunar landing.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has pushed for competing lunar landers similar to the strategy of hiring two companies to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Nelson will resign when President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Monday.

Trump tapped tech billionaire Jared Isaacman to lead NASA. Isaacman, who has twice launched into orbit on his own privately funded SpaceX flights, must be approved by the Senate.

New Glenn’s debut was supposed to send twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. But the space agency pulled them from the planned flight last October when it became clear the rocket would not be ready in time. They will still fly on a New Glenn rocket, but not until spring at the earliest. The two small spacecraft, named Escapade, are intended to study the atmosphere and magnetic environment of Mars while orbiting the red planet.